>> rose: welcome to the program. we begin this evening talking about mitt romney's foreign policy speech at b.m.i. earlier today. joining me, tom friedman. >> and i don't think this is the time when americans are looking after two exhausting and incredibly costly wars in the middle east to be making big foreign policy initiatives. now, that said, we do have v the arab spring and things happen on your watch, you've got to respond to them. and for my money what i would like to do is see us really start to rethink our whole way of relating to that part of the world and i would -- if i had my druthers-- i say this half seriously, half tongue in cheek-- i'd like to see arne duncan, secretary of education, be put in charge of middle east policy. because i think what we really need to be moving toward this there is a kind of race formula. >> rose: we continue looking at foreign policy issues in the campaign with david sanger of "new york times" and richard haass in the council on foreign relations. >> he basically laid out a conditional foreign policy. saying "look, the era where we give aid to

election will have that kind of consequence. >> absolutely. >> one of romney's top foreign policy advisors said the other day that obama has made the united states look impo nent the world. dot facts bear that out. >> i disagree with that. i disagree with that. the suggestion that somehow america could or even should be in the drivers seat in the arab spring is inherently ridiculous. i mean what happened in egypt was done by the people, the young people, primarily, in tahrir square. then the egypt that was left having lost its autocratic superstructure was still an egypt, just look at the distribution of the population, most likely to produce an islamist government, with which it did. all along the way we should try to maximize our values and our interests, including freedom and human rights, and not just majority rule but minority rights, and individual rights. but we couldn't control it, and we shouldn't. and i expect that's what president morsi will say here tomorrow. but if you look at libya, we had more opportunities to influence it, and we did. and we influenced it in a very positive